The 75th annual Cannes Film Festival kicked off last Tuesday, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appearing on a video screen and giving a speech about the importance of filmmaking during war.
Legendary filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard wasn’t a fan of that moment. Commenting on Zelensky's appearance, the French-Swiss filmmaker said:
"Zelensky's intervention at the Cannes festival goes without saying if you look at it from the angle of what is called "staging": a bad actor, a professional comedian, under the eye of other professionals in their own professions. I believe I must have said something along these lines a long time ago. It therefore took the staging of yet another world war and the threat of another catastrophe for us to know that Cannes is a propaganda tool like any other. They propagate Western aesthetics whilst thinking it is not a big deal, but it is just that. The truth of the images is only advancing slowly. Now imagine that the war itself is this aesthetic deployed during a world festival, whose stakeholders are the states in conflict, or rather “interests”, broadcasting representations of which we are all spectators for… you, like me. We often say “conflict of interest”, which is a tautology. There is no conflict, big or small, unless there is interest. Brutus, Nero, Biden, or Putin, Constantinople, Iraq or Ukraine, not much has changed, apart from the mass murder.“
Godard will be Godard.
I honestly found it strange that Zelensky showed up during the Cannes opening ceremonies, just like, probably, the Academy backed off from the idea of having the Ukrainian President give a speech via telecom at the Oscars this past April. It just doesn’t gel well.